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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18568 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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Iran - US - Israel War Flareup

“Israel says it has launched attack on Iran, as explosions reported in Tehran”

“The US has begun Major Combat Operations in Iran” - Donald Trump (headline flashed up just now on my phone, no link yet)

—-

More to follow but thought I’d post quickly for any commenting.

Well, I was wrong about this.

Good rule of thumb for US military interventions: once all the toys are out of the toybox, they're going to get played with.

A message to people trying to negotiate with the US is that the longer you let the build-up continue, the more you're going to have to give up to call it off. The effort involved in assembling these many military assets in-theater makes its momentum hard to stop. The inertia is just too much.

This is a near historical universal- Rome didn't negotiate after their final siege assault was ready.

  • Rome didn't negotiate after their final siege assault was ready

Can you give some citations. My google fu failed me on that topic

The traditional rule is you had until the siege engines were complete (which was enormously expensive and time consuming) to surrender with terms and avoid a sack (The army is allowed to do whatever they want, up to and including killing literally every person in the city they didn't enslave then burning it down on the way out.)

This was to encourage people to not force you to spend the money on the siege, you were incentivized to not break terms on a surrender because then nobody would trust you enough to surrender and many sieges ended with the besieging army half starved/half dead from various illneses.

Caesar described the principle of “murum aries attigit” in his commentary on the Gallic wars, which literally means the “The Ram Has Touched the Wall.” It referred to a Roman policy: surrender would be accepted before, but not after the battering ram touched an enemy’s city walls.

I've heard that the defenders could negotiate up until the ram reached the wall/gates. At that point, it was too late, since defeat was assured and all the hard work on the Roman end had been completed.

Romans usually used a mole- which would prevent negotiation after it was completed, just the same. A ram reaching the wall is, like a mole reaching the wall, the end product of a lengthy process.

I may have been conflating Rome with general medieval siege etiquette. Different techniques, same philosophy and end result.

That was more classical siege etiquette, not medieval. In medieval times sieges tended to be very prolonged, assaults rare, and in general hunger was the main tactic used to force surrender.

Thinking about it, this isn't exactly new policy: The second half of 1990 included "Operation Desert Shield", the operation just to relocate the assets for the actual Gulf War took almost 6 months, and wasn't quiet. The bombardment took a few weeks, and the actual ground invasion just a few days.

Clearly.

I assumed Trump was too invested in a deal of some sort, even a bad one. I also thought he would be too cautious to commit lots of US forces against a country like Iran. All misjudgements on my part.

He hasn't committed anything yet, just a bunch of airstrikes. I could be wrong, but I doubt he'll commit to ground troops. He'll kill a bunch of top military and government leaders and declare victory, meanwhile nothing has changed. Same story as Venezuela.

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